| 13 Aug 2025
Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet (BUV) Retrievals of Mid-Stratospheric Aerosols from the 2022 Hunga Eruption
Abstract. On January 15, 2022, a highly explosive eruption of the submarine Hunga volcano (Kingdom of Tonga) generated the largest stratospheric hydration event ever observed and the largest aerosol perturbation since the 1991 Pinatubo eruption. Here, we develop a novel method for satellite retrieval of stratospheric aerosol optical depth (AOD) and layer peak height (Zp) using solar backscattered ultraviolet (BUV) radiation; this is made possible by the exceptional mid-stratospheric altitude of the Hunga aerosols. We analyze BUV observations of the Hunga stratospheric aerosol cloud on January 17, 2022 (47 hours after the eruption), using UV band 1 measurements from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on board the ESA/Copernicus Sentinel-5 precursor (S5P) satellite and the Ozone Mapping and Profiling Suite- Nadir Profiler (OMPS-NP) on board the NOAA-20 satellite. We retrieve AOD and Zp by fitting hyperspectral BUV radiance ratios in a narrow spectral window restricted to 289–296 nm, chosen in order to reduce interference from tropospheric clouds while highly sensitive to stratospheric aerosols located above ozone maximum altitude. The retrieval employs radiative transfer calculations from the Vector Linearized Discrete Ordinate Radiative Transfer (VLIDORT) forward model. We assume a single Hunga aerosol layer composed of polydisperse sulfuric acid spherical particles embedded in a Rayleigh atmosphere with a known ozone profile. The ozone profile is supplied from a version of the MERRA-2 Stratospheric Composition Reanalysis of the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) on board NASA EOS Aura satellite — produced by NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office using a stratospheric chemistry model and MERRA-2 meteorology. We also include a dynamic SO2 layer, which coincides spatially with the retrieved aerosol vertical profile, and with the total loading normalized to the stratospheric SO2 vertical column density from the operational TROPOMI SO2 product. We validate our AOD retrievals against ground-based AERONET direct-sun AOD measurements as well as co-located OMPS-NP retrievals, and Zp retrievals against Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) overpasses using Lagrangian trajectory modeling. We estimate the total Hunga stratospheric “wet” aerosol mass to be Maer ~ 0.5±0.05 Tg. This value is consistent with our previous BUV estimates of Hunga gaseous sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions ( ~0.5 Tg SO2), and with the rapid conversion of SO2 to sulfuric acid (sulfate) aerosol during the initial plume dispersion (SO2 e-folding time ~ 6 days), and ~0.5 acid mass fraction in aqueous sulfuric acid solution.
Competing interests: Some authors are members of the editorial board of AMT
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